We hear every time the Republicans or Democrats lose the White House, that they need to “rebuild” the party, or that they “need to take the party back.” If the parties were doing the right thing to begin with, there would be no need to rebuild them. Over the last 100 plus years, regardless of the rhetoric, the parties have never been rebuilt into something that resembles a government that the Founding Fathers would feel comfortable with. Each election cycle, regardless of which party is in the White House, brings our Republic further and further away from the Constitution, and closer to some sort of statist or fascist government.

I am not capital “L” Libertarian, though I have been known to vote for folks other than “R” or “D” candidates (yes, I once voted for Ralph Nader). I appreciate the principled point of view of this McNealy fellow, and I wish him well.

I note that on his site he is using Facebook, flickr, linkedin, twitter, meetup, ustream, YouTube, MySpace, AddtoAny, and Google Calendar. That is a pretty complete array of social media and web tools for any business to be using. I’m heartened to see tools like these being used in such a smart way folks participating in the political process. This morning I did some snow shoveling and listened to podcasts. Several were about government, specifically “e-gov” initiatives. Now that Leah and I have moved to Virginia, we’re that much closer to Washington, D.C.

Washington hosts some interesting tech and government events. The Gov 2.0 Expo is coming up in May, for example. There’s a pretty good site for DC events: DC Tech Events.

Anyway, back to the podcasts. One of them was a conversation between John Culberson and Tim O’Reilly. It was fascinating to hear him speak about his experiences using everything from BBS’s in 1987 to twitter in 2010 to go about his political life. I disagree with Culberson politically, I think on just about every current issue, but I agree completely with his usage of, and belief in freedom, open data, and daylight when it comes to how government operates. I found it inspiring and it’s well worth a listen.